04522 - Finest Quality Serrated 2.37 Inch Carcharodontosaurus Dinosaur Tooth KemKem

Gorgeous Carcharodontosaurus tooth. Its preservation is exceptional. It is complete, from the base to the very sharp tip. Its lateral serrations are deeply developed. Finest Quality.

Carcharodontosaurus teeth are relatively easy to find in the North African Cretaceous sites. However, its excellent preservation is something much more difficult to find.

The teeth with strong and vivid fossilization colors such as red, orange and black come from small paleochannels composed by thin layers, in the intermediate and upper stratigraphic levels (Red Sandstone Beds), from the Ifezouane and Aoufous Formations (Kem Kem Basin, South of Morocco). The lithology of this body of sediment is characterized by the dominance of sandstones (also known as arenites) and fluvial gravel, of siliceous nature. Sometimes large concentrations of iron oxide are present, and then a small sample of that is usually present at the base of the tooth.

These mineralizations are responsible for the wide range of beautiful reddish color tones, slowly drawn during millions of years via fossil-diagenetic processes. The complicated sedimentarian architecture of the layers where most large vertebrates are found makes the excavation methodology a real challenge.

Sometimes the local miners have to excavate long tunnels that follow the distribution of the fossiliferous layer. Carcharodontosaurus is a genus of carnivorous carcharodontosaurid dinosaurs that existed between 100 and 94 million years ago, during the Cenomanian stages of the mid-Cretaceous Period. It is currently known to include two species, C.saharicus and C.iguidensis, which were among the larger theropods, as large as or slightly bigger than Tyrannosaurus and possibly slightly larger than Giganotosaurus, but not quite as large as Spinosaurus.